Resisting the Ridiculous

The woman was in her mid-60s, Rosu figures, and wore “an off-the-shoulder leopard-print blouse, no bra, and glitter sprinkled all over her overtanned skin.”

Her hair was “teased to oblivion,” Rosu adds, and “she just strutted to receive the Eucharist like nobody’s business.”

Let’s go out on a limb: The woman probably believed everybody else thought she was dressed fashionably young.

But Rosu, a stylist who makes her living buying clothing for celebrities, had another reaction: “Come on,” she says. “Not only are you disrespecting your age and your location, but what are you thinking?”

Aging gracefully is a tricky thing. It requires looking one’s age, but not in the same way Grandma and Grandpa probably did. It requires mental acceptance of the reality that one is, like it or not, getting older.

Most of all, it requires an iron-willed resistance to putting on or having done to oneself things that aren’t now, never were, and won’t ever be intended for anybody older than 25.

“I had a lady the other day in her early 70s who brought me a picture from a magazine,” says Mary Arnold of Professional Permanent Cosmetics. “She wanted me to make her lips look like a model who was about 23 and had big, poufy lips. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do that. I can do that. I don’t want to do that.’ “

Arnold estimates that 70 percent of her work is “correcting other people’s work. I get people with the weirdest-looking stuff coming in, and they think they’re just gorgeous.”

Dr. Julio Garcia, a Las Vegas plastic surgeon, says he spends more time now than he did a decade or so ago talking patients down from cosmetic procedures they unrealistically think will make them look younger.

“I would say a good 10 (percent) or 15 percent of patients I see nowadays I don’t want to operate on,” he says.

This sometimes-overboard concern with looking young probably begins with our culture, which “has been youth-obsessed for some time. Certainly, it really started in the post-World War II period,” notes Jeremy Wallach, an assistant professor of popular culture at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University.

And, riding on the other side of that cultural seesaw, has been increasing societal denigration of aging.

“Today, if you look at the portrayal of older people in our popular culture, they basically do one of two things: They are ridiculous stereotypes that exist to annoy the protagonist, or they die,” Wallach says.

Maybe an obsession with looking young also stems from the insecurity people feel because of the media’s images of aging. For example, Garcia says, celebrities are portrayed in “such an idealized fashion,” despite ample evidence from the tabloids that “these celebrities don’t always look like that.”

Trying too hard to look too young also could stem from nervously aging adults “trying to recapture their youth and the fond memories of their youth,” Rosu says. Or, they might be trying to “identify with their kids or their co-workers if their co-workers are younger. They want to seem hip and in-the-know.”

Whatever the reasons, Arnold suspects the pressure to look young no matter what can be even more acute in Las Vegas than it is in many other cities.

“Las Vegas is like the capital of beauty. It’s no longer Hollywood. It’s Las Vegas,” she says. “There’s so much beauty out there. It’s like you go to a restaurant and you want to look nice.”

The irony is that trying too hard to look young invariably has a way of backfiring. For example, while understandably reluctant to speak for his entire generation, Wallach, 37, concedes that “plenty of people a generation younger” consider baby boomers’ attempts to dress young “inappropriate and laughable.”

Not to mention, he adds, “just kind of pathetic.”

Now don’t misunderstand: Nobody is saying black socks-and-sandals combos and polyester muumuus have to be in any boomer’s future. But aging gracefully, in ways that acknowledge the inexorable passage of time? Now that’s the trick.

An older woman, Arnold says, “can be classy and look beautiful and age gracefully, without (wearing) a miniskirt and tank top.”

The ironic thing, Arnold adds: Do it right and it’ll actually make you look younger.

By the way, this is not just a woman’s problem, as anybody who has ever seen a middle-aged man in a Speedo can attest. Similarly, Garcia offers, “a 50-year-old man with a paunch should not be wearing low-rise jeans.”

And, Wallach notes, advertisers and marketers have “successfully gotten men to be insecure about their appearance. It’s no longer OK to be bald, it’s no longer OK to be gray, it’s certainly never OK to be fat or to be out of shape.”

But, for both men and women, aging gracefully requires, first, a resistance to thinking that something — an outfit, a procedure — intended for a 20-year-old will magically do the trick. From there, it’s all about the basics of keeping fit, eating right and dressing with an eye toward your actual, real-life body.

It also takes education, because the skin, the hair and the body do change with age. That, says Jennifer Lynn, director of spa and salon services at Caesars Palace, is where a professional can help.

Makeup, hairstyles and hair colors all have to continue to change and evolve in order to be age-appropriate, Lynn says. “We are in a unique position in which we can continue to educate our guests about what is, perhaps, more age-appropriate without saying, ‘This is an age-appropriate look for you.’ “

A bit of self-reflection wouldn’t hurt, either.

“Examine the reasons you insist on wearing that leopard-print top that’s threatening to squeeze the life out of you,” Rosu suggests. “Ask yourself why are you refusing to leave the house in anything other than leather pants?”

Then look for ways to incorporate into your daily life touches of younger-skewing trends. For example, Rosu says, try incorporating a floral design — big, she says, for spring — in a handbag, versus an outfit that’ll have you “looking like the upholstery.”

“You can look chic,” she says, “without looking totally ridiculous.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0280.